Texture arrays

Similar to regular 2D textures (Texture2D class, sampler2D in shaders), cube maps (CubemapA collection of six square textures that can represent the reflections in an environment or the skybox drawn behind your geometry. The six squares form the faces of an imaginary cube that surrounds an object; each face represents the view along the directions of the world axes (up, down, left, right, forward and back). More infoSee in Glossary class, samplerCUBE in shaders), and 3D textures (Texture3D class, sampler3D in shaders), Unity also supports 2D texture arrays.

A texture array is a collection of same size/format/flags 2D textures that look like a single object to the GPU, and can be sampled in the shaderA small script that contains the mathematical calculations and algorithms for calculating the Color of each pixel rendered, based on the lighting input and the Material configuration. More infoSee in Glossary with a texture element index. They are useful for implementing custom terrainThe landscape in your scene. A Terrain GameObject adds a large flat plane to your scene and you can use the Terrain’s Inspector window to create a detailed landscape. More infoSee in GlossaryrenderingThe process of drawing graphics to the screen (or to a render texture). By default, the main camera in Unity renders its view to the screen. More infoSee in Glossary systems or other special effects where you need an efficient way of accessing many textures of the same size and format. Elements of a 2D texture array are also known as slices, or layers.

Platform Support

Texture arrays need to be supported by the underlying graphics API and the GPU. They are available on:

Direct3D 11/12 (Windows, Xbox One)

OpenGL CoreThe back-end Unity uses to support the latest OpenGL features on Windows, MacOS X and Linux. More infoSee in Glossary (Mac OS X, Linux)

Creating and manipulating texture arrays

As there is no texture import pipeline for texture arrays, they must be created from within your scriptsA piece of code that allows you to create your own Components, trigger game events, modify Component properties over time and respond to user input in any way you like. More infoSee in Glossary. Use the Texture2DArray class to create and manipulate them. Note that texture arrays can be serialized as assetsAny media or data that can be used in your game or Project. An asset may come from a file created outside of Unity, such as a 3D model, an audio file or an image. You can also create some asset types in Unity, such as an Animator Controller, an Audio Mixer or a Render Texture. More infoSee in Glossary, so it is possible to create and fill them with data from editor scripts.

Using texture arrays as render targets

Texture array elements may also be used as render targets. Use RenderTexture.dimension to specify in advance whether the render target is to be a 2D texture array. The depthSlice argument to Graphics.SetRenderTarget specifies which mipmap level or cube map face to render to. On platforms that support “layered rendering” (i.e. geometry shaders), you can set the depthSlice argument to –1 to set the whole texture array as a render target. You can also use a geometry shader to render into individual elements.

Using texture arrays in shaders

Since texture arrays do not work on all platforms, shaders need to use an appropriate compilation target or feature requirement to access them. The minimum shader model compilation target that supports texture arrays is 3.5, and the feature name is 2darray.